Voting in Tunisia’s presidential election has ended with no real opposition to incumbent Kais Saied, widely tipped to win a second term as his most prominent critics, including a key contender, are behind bars.
Tunisia’s election authority reported a voter turnout of 27.7 percent on Sunday in the country’s presidential election, against a 55 percent turnout in 2019. The figure is the lowest the north African nation has recorded in a presidential poll since its revolution in 2011.
Three years after a sweeping power grab by Saied, the election on Sunday is seen as a closing chapter in Tunisia’s experiment with democracy.
Polling stations opened at 8am (07:00 GMT) and closed at 6pm (17:00 GMT). Preliminary results should come no later than Wednesday but may be known earlier, according to the Independent High Authority for Elections of Tunisia (ISIE).
About 9.7 million voters were eligible to vote. A victory for Saied is certain as opposition candidates were either barred or jailed leading up to the polls. Saied came to power with the promise to revive the country’s economy, but instead he turned his focus on amassing more power, thereby undermining democracy in the country.
In the lead-up to the polling day on Sunday, there have been no campaign rallies or public debates, and nearly all of the campaign posters in city streets have been of Saied.
With little hope for change in a country mired in economic crisis, the mood among much of the electorate has been one of resignation.
“We have nothing to do with politics,” Mohamed, a 22-year-old who gave only his first name for fear of retribution, told the AFP news agency in Tunis.
Neither he nor his friends planned to vote, he said, because they believed it was “useless”.
The North African country had prided itself for more than a decade on being the birthplace of the Arab Spring uprisings against dictatorship.
Hopes of establishing democracy, however, soon faded after Saied took control of the government in 2021 and later dissolved the parliament, after being democratically elected in 2019.
Crackdown on dissent ensued, and a number of Saied’s critics across the political spectrum were jailed, prompting criticism both at home and abroad.
New York-based Human Rights Watch has said more than “170 people are detained in Tunisia on political grounds or for exercising their fundamental rights”.
Jailed opposition figures include Rached Ghannouchi, head of the Islamist-inspired opposition party Ennahda, which dominated political life after the revolution.
Also imprisoned is Abir Moussi, head of the Free Constitutional Party, which critics accuse of wanting to bring back the regime ousted in 2011.
Several other presidential contenders are also behind bars, including Ayachi Zammel, who was sentenced to 12 years in prison on Tuesday.
The International Crisis Group think tank said on Friday that “the president’s nationalist discourse and economic hardship” have “corroded any enthusiasm ordinary citizens might have felt about the election”.
“Many fear that a new mandate for Saied will only deepen the country’s socioeconomic woes, as well as hasten the regime’s authoritarian drift,” it said.
On Friday, hundreds of people protested in the capital Tunis, marching along a heavily policed Avenue Habib Bourguiba as some demonstrators bore signs denouncing Saied as a “Pharaoh manipulating the law”.
